The method in Marina's magnetism

One of the first things you notice about Marina Abramovic, the so-called ''grandmother of performance art'', is that she looks nothing like a grandmother. At 65, she is certainly old enough, but she still seems younger. Not only in her face, which would shame many plastic surgery-obsessed Hollywood stars, but also in her bearing, voice and attitude.

Trust her to be different. Here is a woman who, in her 1974 piece Rhythm 0, invited audience members to apply various objects - nails, lipstick, a scalpel, a bullet, a gun - to her body while she stood unresisting for six hours. (One bystander pointed the gun at her head but couldn't bring himself to shoot.) In her 2010 performance The Artist is Present, she sat immobile at a table for 736 hours while visitors to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) took turns sitting opposite her. The rules of logic (and, it seems, the laws of physics) might not apply to Abramovic.

Still life … Marina Abramovic and a visitor during a performance piece, The Artist is Present, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Credit:AP/Mary Altaffer

Nonetheless, the iconoclast - born in the former Yugoslavia and based in New York - is thinking of her legacy. Last month, she launched the Marina Abramovic Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. ''It was very important to create a centre where all seven different performing arts [can be showcased],'' she says.

Though launched at a MoMA gallery in Queens, New York, the institute will be in a former theatre in the town of Hudson, two hours north-west.

Advertisement

However esoteric her work might be, Abramovic is a straight talker. ''Why is this institute in my name? It's not because I want to live forever. I took my name because I feel like I've become a brand, like Coca-Cola. When you say 'Marina Abramovic', it's not about painting. It's about hardcore performing arts,'' she says.

Abramovic's art has had many interpretations, though critics often remark that it benefits from her magnetic presence. Abramovic doesn't opt for simple, brief explanations. Indeed, the performance space at the institute - like the artist herself - will specialise in performances with a minimum length of six hours.

''After 40 years of my career, I realise that only long-durational work of art has the serious potential to change the viewer looking at it but also the performer doing it. Because the performance is long, it becomes like life itself,'' she says.

Of The Artist is Present, she says: ''That really changed me, mentally, physically and many other ways.''

Part of a retrospective of her work at MoMA, it was all filmed by documentary maker Matthew Akers for his film Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present, which will screen as part of the Sydney Film Festival.

Akers notes Abramovic's different personae. ''She has her performance Marina. She has her social Marina that is very seductive and you just want to hang out with all the time … I had all these doubts but they were all completely overshadowed by the force of her personality, the force of her charisma and what she ended up pulling off. I think it was a masterpiece.''

Such performances, however, require training for more than just the artist. ''Typically, the performer gets trained,'' a partner at OMA, Shohei Shigematsu, says, ''but in her case, because it's such a long duration, the audience also get trained.''

Some visitors, dressed in lab coats, are part of the performance. Audience participation is a cornerstone of Abramovic's art and essential to the ''Abramovic Method'' of training.

''You have to sign a contract, giving your word of honour that you will spend 2½ hours in this experiment,'' Abramovic says, ''and, when you do that, you will get the certificate of accomplishment.''

She has experimented with the Abramovic Method in Milan, using willing guinea pigs. In March, just as the ''performance'' was almost over, one of the participants fainted. It was Stefano Boeri, a Milan councillor.

''In America, I would have been put in prison,'' Abramovic says. ''There was him, completely white like a wall, lying on the ground and I am here with a certificate to give to him. He was half dead.''

Boeri, however, attended the launch in New York, describing with wonder his experience of ''being completely isolated and at the same time, completely exposed''.

Nonetheless, the institute is designed to be user-friendly. According to Shigematsu, they have researched other lengthy spectator events, such as baseball. Designers also examined space stations, medical beds and aircraft to design a long-durational chair, perhaps even one with an inbuilt urinal.

''In the end,'' Shigematsu says, ''they decided to go for something that is a combination of massage chair and wheelchair. You can actually watch the long-durational performance in a very comfortable manner. But when you are asleep, you can actually get Marina's staff wheeling you out.''

Abramovic wants the institute to be completed by 2014, existing as a showcase for many artists to present their long performances.

''Six hours is just the minimum,'' Abramovic says. ''My dream is to invite David Lynch to make a 360-hour movie.''

The pitch might not win over Hollywood executives. But, if anyone can convince them, Abramovic might be just the artist.

Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present screens on June 16 and 17 as part of the Sydney Film Festival.